page_title: Public Domain Day
section_title: Public domain
hierarchical_section_title: Public Domain Day / Public domain
caption_attribution_description: English: Public Domain Day Celebration at the European Parliament
context_page_description: Public Domain Day is an observance of when copyrights expire and works enter into the public domain. This legal transition of copyright works into the public domain usually happens every year on 1 January based on the individual copyright laws of each country.
  The observance of a "Public Domain Day" was initially informal; the earliest known mention was in 2004 by Wallace McLean, with support for the idea echoed by Lawrence Lessig. Several websites list the authors whose works are entering the public domain each January 1. There are activities in countries around the world by various organizations all under the banner Public Domain Day.
context_section_description: Copyright protection terms are typically described as the life of the author plus a certain number of years after his or her death (or pma: post mortem auctoris). In many jurisdictions, this usually means that 70 years have passed since the day of author's death. After that period, the works of those authors become fully available so that everyone—without any need for prior authorization—can access and use them for any purpose whatsoever. Legally, this happens on New Year's Day (January 1). That means that in those countries, the works of authors who died, anywhere in the world, throughout the year of 1950, passed into public domain on 1 January 2020.
  Since public domain rights vary based on jurisdiction, the passage of a work into the public domain is not worldwide. The most noticeable exception is the United States, where no additional published works entered the public domain automatically from 1999 to 2018. Australia's copyright scheme is even more restrictive, with no Public Domain Day possible until 2026. Most of Europe will witness various works passing into the public domain, as will Canada and New Zealand. Many more works would be entering the public domain if not for the copyright extension that has occurred several times in the past several decades.
  Public Domain Day in 2010 celebrated the entry to the public domain in many countries of the works of authors such as Sigmund Freud, William Butler Yeats, Ford Madox Ford and Arthur Rackham. In 2011, it celebrated the public domain status of Isaac Babel, Walter Benjamin, John Buchan, Mikhail Bulgakov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emma Goldman, Paul Klee, Selma Lagerlöf, Leon Trotsky, Vito Volterra, Nathanael West, and others.
caption: A public domain photo from a public domain celebration in 2016 (Brussels, Julia Reda speaking)
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